Melville Intermediate - Modelling another classroom in Minecraft

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More PowerPoint presentations from Myles Webb

Melville Intermediate - Selwyn House in Minecraft Presentation

Earlier this term, inspired by 'Room with a View' from the Figure it Out, Mathematics Curriculum Geometry Level Three Books - although we adapted it slightly.  Those of you familar with the teaching resource will know that under the material listed it suggests a speaker phone.  We put a twist on it, and used our Aotearoa Quadblogging Buddies, Tawa Intermediate and Selwyn House to communicate with by leaving comments on their blog and then responding to them.   This allowed us to refine our questioning technique and also improve the use of mathematical language that our students were using, this worked for both us and our buddies that we were working with.

We started with a two dimensional grid model, refined it with responses from our buddies, converted our two dimensional grid to a three dimensional sketch, contacted our buddies about the sketch, built a three dimensional cube model based on the sketch, and finally constructed the finished classroom in Minecraft.

We then contacted our buddies to show them the results.  Elizabeth, one of the Room Five students filmed this video explaining the process.  You can see some of the screenshots in the process here.
 
  ElizabethMinecraftExplanation from myles webb on Vimeo.

From a teaching perspective a week long project stretched into four weeks however the students were engaged, they were collaborating with other students form across New Zealand and they used Minecraft in a constructive way.  The producing of the final Minecraft model was the quickest part of the whole project.  We completed models of two out of three of our Quadblogging buddies and will continue posting the results during our term break and early next term.

Melville Intermediate - A fantastic Quadblogging Aotearoa Collaboration

As part of Geometry this term our students have been excited with the prospect of constructing scale models of other classrooms around New Zealand involving (first) 3d models and then Minecraft.  The students are currently at the questioning stage.  Thanks to our friends at Tawa Intermediate, Selwyn House in Christchurch and Mt Pleasant School our students have left comments on their class or individual blogs and sought information about the classroom layout. 

Already the activity is paying learning dividends because a number of our students have realised that their questions need to be more detailed and more direct so that the 2d plan of the layout can be more accurate.  The great thing about the blogging aspect

of this is that an online conversation between the students is being recorded in the commenting that is going to allow its progression and development to be easily monitored.   In the next few days we should complete our students two dimensional drafts which we are then going to send to our Aotearoa Quadblogging buddies.  From there the learning communication and conversations should develop further.  Stay tuned.

Melville Intermediate - Quadblogging/Minecraft Collaboration

This term in class we're looking at Geometry as our major subject in Mathematics.  Currently were working on a variety of tasks, one of which is from Figure It Out Geometry, Level Three.  In this task

'Room With A View' (which is from page thirteen if you've got the book in front of you).  Requires you to model a classroom using a speaker phone and reconstruct the classroom through the instructions of the person that you've spoken to.

We thought we'd take it one step further.  We've left comments to our Aotearoa Quadbloggoing Buddy Classes to ask for help with this.  We're going to use the contacts that we made with Selwyn House, Mt Pleasant School and Tawa Intermediate.  We've either left comments or are leaving comments that will give us enough information to construct models using Geometric language.  Over the next week we'll receive replies from our Quadblogging buddies, and then we'll construct the classroom based on our replies.  The construction of the classroom is taking two forms - we're going to draw it, what we think it is like, construct a model of the class, and top it off by building the classroom belonging to our buddies in Minecraft.  We're then going to share the models with the students who are in the classrooms.  A great collaboration that we'll keep updating in the next week and a bit!